With internet capabilities becoming more and more robust, events such as lectures and presentations, may now be accessed remotely instead of solely being in-person experiences. For example, events that typically were only accessible to individuals who purchased tickets to view the event live, now may also include an online portion. In fact, some events have moved to be solely online experiences, with all participants and the host remotely logging into the event. Individuals may now have the ability to access live events from the comfort of their own home via their user device (e.g., laptop, desktop, mobile device, etc.).
Although events may be accessed by individuals both in-person and online, integrating these two aspects may raise various difficulties. For instance, online participants often are not able to interact with the event in the same manner as individuals who are physically present at the event. For example, students in a classroom may raise their hand to ask a teacher a question, whereas online participants of the classroom may not. Students accessing the class remotely may be at a disadvantage because they may not be able to interact with the teacher and/or other students of the class in the same manner as those who are physically present in the classroom.
Thus, it would be beneficial for there to be systems and methods that integrate online participants into a live event seamlessly so that they may interact and experience the event as if they were physically present.
With these abilities now affordable to online participants accessing online events, the number of online participants has also vastly increased. This can make organizing and tracking all of the online participants a much more complex task due to the large number of online participants. There are a variety of ways that a host of an event may manage the online participants. For example, each online participant may have a corresponding indicator that may be displayed on the host's device, which the host may place within various groups, select to be spotlighted, or perform a myriad of other options with. However, as the number of online participants grow, the ability to display an indicator for each online participant on a single display screen becomes especially difficult. As another example, a random sampling of online participants may be displayed on the host's device. However, this approach also has inherent drawbacks because the host may not be able to recognize one or more individuals attempting to interact with the event because their corresponding indicator(s) may not be visible to the host because they may not be included within the current random sample of participants.
Thus, it would be beneficial for there to be systems and methods that allow a host to monitor and manage indicators corresponding to a large amount of online participants of an event that allows the participants to easily interact with any attendees of the event, presenters of the event, and/or other online participants accessing the event.
Often times within online events, online participants may desire to form groups including one or more additional online participants. Typically, this is performed by creating a “room” where participants may congregate such that communications of the individuals within the room are prioritized over communications from others. However, this may provide drawbacks to individuals who desire to be in a small group or conversation with only a select few participants, or for individuals who may not want to privately communicate with every participant who has entered the room. Furthermore, participants located within a specific room may decide that they would like to form an additional subgroup within the room including one or more participants from the room, which in typical scenarios may require a separate room to be formed for the participants to then transfer to.
Thus, it would be beneficial for there to be systems and methods that allow users to form group communications directly by selecting particular participants from an online event to form the group with.